Build The Future: Leading Through Change

“Some days everything is on fire and it's a catastrophe. The important question is whether the big picture moved.”

That is Katja Rantala's description of what it is like to work in an environment that keeps changing shape. She is the VP of People at Aiven, and her advice to her own team is not to try harder, but to stop aiming at perfection.

“Perfection doesn't exist, least of all in a world that moves as fast as Aiven does. If you chase it, you just destroy yourself and everyone around you.”

How did Katja forge a career in People and Culture?

Katja didn't plan any of this. At university she studied international politics, specialised in EU policy and expected to end up in the diplomatic service.

A fixed-term post in government changed her plans for good. The pace at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs was simply not hers. When the contract ended she stumbled into a headhunting startup and discovered she was good at something nobody had trained her for.

“Searching for people and getting the match right was almost addictive.”
She describes everything since as a current rather than a plan.
“I feel like I've been sailing in a boat that drifts left and right,” she says, “and interesting opportunities just keep showing up.”

For the last ten years those opportunities have all been with companies in similar positions: international technology businesses at an inflection point, chasing aggressive growth, heading for a listing, or rebuilding the business while it runs.

Katja arrived at Aiven seven months ago, already knowing the company. She had spent years working alongside engineering teams, and Aiven was a product those teams used and talked about.

She also knew, from the outside, where some of the difficulties were.
“In this ecosystem everyone knows everyone. Someone you know has always worked at the company you're about to join. So I had a very realistic picture of what I was walking into.”

Katja explains more about her motivations for joining Aiven here:

What has Katja learned from working in tech?

Working with companies attempting difficult things has taught Katja two lessons. Ambition she picked up from leaders who set demanding goals and refused to settle. The second lesson took longer. Somewhere along the way she stopped bracing against uncertainty, and by now she would probably miss it if it disappeared. Most leaders would rather it did, and talking them out of that is part of her job.

“The leadership has to tolerate that imperfection too,” Katja says. “There's no sense in losing your nerve because the world around you isn't exactly what you imagined. It was never going to be.”

The complicated growth stories she has lived through taught her the rest.
“When you've seen as many of them as I have, you learn to be an incredibly creative problem solver. There is always a solution to be found.”
Tolerating imperfection does not mean standing back from the work.

Aiven's headcount is deliberately small, nobody is considered too senior to do the basic work, and the CEO is still very vested in the code developers ship in the platform. He even rolls up his sleeves to solve the same problems as the rest of the team too.

“That's what walking the talk actually means,” Katja says.
It is also the same instinct that keeps Aiven from going fully remote.
“We believe in physically meeting,” she says. “At our Helsinki office people come in to eat the bread Helen bakes every week. It's part of the experience. Real encounters, and the constant feeling that you're learning, that you're surrounded by clever people and you get to grow in their slipstream.”

She is also careful not to oversell the place. Solving hard technical problems takes grit and self-direction, and Aiven will not suit everyone.
“This isn't a finished environment. But Aiven is a company where everyone truly gets to have an impact, because we aren't that big and we don't want to be either.”

What she would most like outsiders to understand is what the company is attempting right now.

“Very few companies reach the point where they have to reinvent the strategy and the whole business. Aiven is at that point now, and doing it well is very hard. This is one of the places capable of change on that scale.”